Girl Scouts pull up stakes at Hickory Hill

NORTHBRIDGE — For a few weeks during each of the past 62 summers, Girl Scouts came to Camp Hickory Hill, hidden in the woods along Meadow Pond, and lived on the wild side.

They picked blueberries and made blueberry pancakes on metal can "buddy burners." They sang songs, shouting out the endings so the Boy Scouts across the pond might hear. They swam, took nature walks, earned badges in water safety after tipping over their canoes and made lifelong friends.

Now all that is left are a few old buildings, a stone fireplace and flagpole by the water, and memories.

The camp, which belonged to the Girl Scouts of Central and Western Massachusetts on land leased from the Whitinsville Water Co., will not re-open because of economic and safety concerns.

Frances Gauthier, 68, of Whitinsville, a former service unit manager who oversaw generations of Girl Scouts and attended Hickory Hill as a child in 1955, said a group of former campers organized a commemorative gathering scheduled for 3 to 5 p.m. June 22, rain or shine, at Hickory Hill on Prentice Road.

There will be cake, bottled water, songs and a chance to reconnect. The flag will be lowered at 4:45 for the last time, from the flagpole with the plaque honoring the late Muriel E. Graves, a dedicated volunteer, placed by Northbridge Girl Scouts in 2000.

"We want to make sure Hickory Hill is recognized. It was important to many, many women and girls since 1952," Mrs. Gauthier said.

"We cared about this place," she said. "We have no idea if we're going to have three people or 33 people."

Suzanne Smiley, chief operating officer for the Girl Scouts of Central and Western Massachusetts, said Hickory Hill was leased on a year-to-year basis. When some of the other property leases with the Whitinsville Water Co. stopped being renewed a few years ago, the regional Girl Scouts council became concerned about its future.

At the same time, the structures at the primarily day camp were old — some built by Whitin Machine Works and other volunteers in the early 1950s — and needed significant repairs.

But the biggest issues, Ms. Smiley said, concerned adequate protection for campers. The camp didn't have proper shelters for increasingly frequent severe weather events, such as thunderstorms, and camp leaders had to scramble to get buses to take girls to safer grounds.

"That was the thing that pushed us over the edge," Ms. Smiley said. "In the end, it comes down to the health and safety of the girls."

Also, because of increased flooding, the portable toilets that replaced the wooden latrine had to be moved farther away from shore and toward the center of the camp, which wasn't ideal.

"The organization is not in a place to afford to put a lot of money into property we don't own. We don't have the resources to support it in the long term," she said.

"I know it's been a treasured camp for many, many years. There's nothing about the site really driving us away except for these things that are out of our control."

Ms. Smiley said 250 to 300 girls attended Hickory Hill each summer.

Campers in southern Worcester County and the Blackstone Valley will be invited to attend the Girl Scouts' own Camp Laurel Wood in Spencer, which has storm-ready facilities and a ranger on site. Former Hickory Hill campers will get a discount this summer to help ease the transition, Ms. Smiley said.

Whitinsville Water Co. General Manager Randy Swigor said the company doesn't have any plans for the land and will leave it as it is for now, in case the Girl Scouts want to return or another group wants to use the site.

He said the state required that four or five summer cottages on other leased-out property on Meadow Pond be removed a few years ago because they were too close to the water supply.

The Girl Scouts "were great tenants. They always kept the place clean, kept it up," Mr. Swigor said. "We were happy to have them."

On a recent visit to the vacant camp and on social media sites, memories shared by Hickory Hill campers were filled with joys, accomplishments, life-changing experiences, fears and even the "yuck" factor of enormous daddy longlegs in the tents or the unsavory task of having to scrub out the latrine.

One former camper on Facebook said, "It did build character," while others said they loved every minute.

For many, it was their first stay away from home, whether for the overnight camp that ran in its early years or the last-night sleepover in recent summer day-camp sessions.

"I was across the pond. It was like Pretoria. It was a big deal when I was 10," Mrs. Gauthier said.

Sandra Clarke, 73, of Whitinsville, attended Hickory Hill in its inaugural years, starting around 1953. As a senior Girl Scout, she also worked with younger girls. Mrs. Clarke has a photo album from the mid-1950s she plans to bring to the gathering.

"It would be a loss for the Girl Scouts in the area not to have a place to go nearby," Mrs. Clarke said.

She recalled hiking to "the deer camp," a private estate nearby, where the girls would camp overnight. "We'd stay in sleeping bags and prayed it didn't rain," she said.

Mrs. Clarke said she learned to water ski off a raft in the pond. And she met her future husband, who passed away last year, at Hickory Hill.

"He was flirting with the counselors. I didn't like him," she said about her first impressions of the local farmer who came calling.

Hickory Hill made a lifelong impact on Judy Whittaker, 57, of Whitinsville, who attended and then worked at the camp for 18 years, starting in 1974.

"I hated it when I came here as a kid. I was homesick," Mrs. Whittaker said. "But when I became a worker here, they put me in charge of the homesick kids. I loved it as a camp, but didn't like being away from home."

She recalled learning secrets of outdoor cooking from Elaine Jones, whom the Girl Scouts of Upton honored in 1995 with a plaque by the "keyhole" fireplace outside the original mess hall, essentially an elongated campfire.

"We learned to make chocolate cake in soup cans. We learned how to use a reflector oven," Mrs. Whittaker said. "People think of roasting marshmallows over a fire — we had jelly rolls." Mrs. Gauthier recalled those as "doughboys," made on a stick dipped in Bisquick, roasted — or burned — and filled with jelly or pudding.

A retired Whitinsville Christian School teacher, Mrs. Whittaker said she taught her sixth-grade classes knot-tying learned at Hickory Hill.

Mrs. Gauthier's daughter-in-law, Jaime Gauthier, 35, a teacher at Northbridge Middle School, said her most vivid memories were of searching for Jerome the Gnome, who left notes for people, and walking up the brook that runs along the edge of the campground.

She said girls had to bring special shoes to walk up the rocky stream and often picked up a leech or two. "But it was an exciting day. You looked forward to it."

Another former camper and counselor, now a kindergarten teacher in Millis, Jennifer Guertin, 33, of Uxbridge, said, "I was just in awe of the place. It was the first time for some of us spending the night away from home."

She recalled Jerome the Gnome, the morning songs and flag ceremony, and adopting the camp counselor name Ketchup. Her friends were Mustard and Relish, naturally.

When the girls had to be shuttled to the Whitin Community Center one night for their parents to pick them up during a thunderstorm, Mrs. Guertin said, she was more upset about missing the overnight at camp than about the storm.

Mrs. Guertin was sad to learn Hickory Hill was closing. She is the mother of a 2-year-old and said, "My first thought was that my daughter won't be able to experience what I experienced. I was looking forward to experiencing it again through her eyes."

"There's 60 years of memories here," Mrs. Gauthier said.

"But they were all great," Mrs. Whittaker jumped in. "There were always tears at the end when they had to leave. There's a lot of love here."

Contact Susan Spencer at susan.spencer@telegram.com Follow her on Twitter: @SusanSpencerTG